Official racism

"You look like a real Araboosh," Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch told an undercover police agent this week, using derogatory Hebrew slang for an Arab, in front of open microphones and a large audience of police officers and journalists.

Later, in view of the commotion he had caused, he apologized offhandedly, explaining that it was a joke, a customary way of speaking in the police force and that he meant no offense.

It is becoming clear that the Netanyahu-Lieberman government has a bitterly ironic edge - its ministers, especially those of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, express in public things that had only been whispered in closed rooms until now, removing the mask from ugly, repressed norms.

But these are not mere words. They reflect an attitude that deviates from the norm, a contemptuous attitude toward Arabs and a harsher treatment of Arab criminals or suspects. The police's behavior in the October 2000 events - violent clashes between Arab Israelis and police that resulted in the death of 13 Arabs, 12 of them Israeli citizens - was roundly censured by the Orr Commission. It is an extreme but unmistakable manifestation of the prevailing attitude. Since then 30 more Arab Israelis have been killed in clashes with the police, and no special inquiry was opened. The five senior police officers who came to Aharonovitch's defense on Wednesday did not do so only in a gesture of camaraderie. Those who are accustomed to the ease with which the police use guns and truncheons in Israel's Arab communities must have difficulty understanding what is so terrible about one unfortunate utterance.

Israel didn't invent the disturbing link between derogatory language and racist violence, which very quickly becomes an accepted norm. But other countries have learned from history that words are a faithful mirror to dangerous attitudes. It is hard to imagine an American politician today who would refer to an African-American with a racist slur, either seriously or jokingly, and remain in office. Or a French cabinet minister who would call a citizen of Arab or Jewish origin by a derogatory term used by French racists, and continue to serve in his post.

The law in those countries deals harshly with racists. Beyond that, the consensus there is conducive to a sweeping condemnation of racist remarks and racist violence. In Israel the proper sensitivity to racism has not yet developed and the reactions to Aharonovitch's statement are almost automatically divided between right and left, Jews and Arabs.

In the absence of an incisive debate on the ills of racism and Israeli society's dangerous ideological debasement, each side is entrenching itself in its positions - crude aggressiveness on the one hand and politically correct purism on the other - while everyone is preoccupied with a hackneyed verbal quarrel that doesn't deal with the roots of the problem.

In view of all this the cabinet's position is especially grave, for in the thundering silence of all its members, including Labor Party ministers, it provides Aharonovitch and his words with inappropriate backing.

It is not too late. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can still choose to stand before the public and his cabinet, firmly denounce this way of speaking and the unacceptable worldview behind it, and if not dismiss Aharonovitch at least rebuke him. Any other response by Netanyahu will be interpreted as state sanction for blatant racist manifestations toward Israel's Arab citizens.